Episode IX: Return of the Blog Post

Hey everybody! This last month and a half since the last blog post I made seems like it has gone on forever. To put how long it's been in perspective, when I wrote my last blog post, the second presidential debate hadn’t occurred yet, people still weren’t stressed about November 1st college application deadlines, and I was still only working on my outline for my literature review. Obviously, a lot has happened since then!

    In this time, I went from a line of reasoning, to a fully completed, peer edited literature review. Although the refining and writing process was full of roadblocks, redbulls, and revisions, in the end, I’m proud of the finished product.

To me, it is crazy how much I have accomplished in less than four months of being in AP research. I know, that for the first few weeks of the class, I felt as if I was floundering around when I did not know what I wanted to do for my project. However, after I figured out that I wanted to research the components of successful charter schools, I found that this resulted in greater motivation and a better quality of work.

    After talking broadly about what I did this past trimester, I am now going to discuss what I did in a little more detail. After determining what my general topic of inquiry was, I then read most of the important literature surrounding charter schools, how they perform, and the theory behind their origins. As I read each source, I took notes on the important details and compiled this information on both a google document and in the spreadsheet. After reading my sources, I was then given the task of writing the annotated bibliography for the 20 or so sources that I had read on my topic. Although it was a significant task, I found that it was really beneficial for me because it made me think about the connections between my sources and the implications of such. As a result, this was really useful in helping me to construct my line of reasoning.

    Throughout this process, the line of reasoning was probably the most difficult part. Although I had the annotated bibliography to help me out, the line of reasoning is what requires the most brainstorming and thinking. That is because it is during this time that the connections and organization for the paper is created. Although it is not a very fun task to do, this is the segment that determined how good my literature review is. After that though, I found that the most difficult part of the actual literature review was cutting it down. For me, my sentences are often very verbose, and so it was somewhat of a struggle to not only cut out unnecessary information, but to also make my phrasing more concise.

    Now that the literature review is done though, it is time to move onto developing my research methods. I know I have mentioned this in the past, but this is still something that I am somewhat apprehensive about. As I stated in the past, I am still unsure how exactly I plan on going about designing my independent research; however, the fact that I now get to dedicate time to focus solely on answering this question is comforting.

    I look forward bringing back the blog posts and keeping everybody up to date on what is happening on my project. Until next week!